


The five stages of grief

by astrokath



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Gen, Last Minute Treat, Pre-Canon, Siblings, under 1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 08:04:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1597619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrokath/pseuds/astrokath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The denial doesn't last for very long. Kieren's an artist, and artists have been doing stupid fucking things forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The five stages of grief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liliaeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liliaeth/gifts).



The denial doesn't last for very long. Kieren's an _artist_ , and artists have been doing stupid fucking things forever. There were probably cavemen who offed themselves for less – the kind who found guilt in the eyes of dying reindeer, before finger-painting them onto the walls of their favourite fucking caves...

That fucking, _fucking_ cave.

 

*

 

She's mostly angry for Mum and Dad. Being a melodramatic shit is all very well and all, but it's not like _they_ get to channel their grief into shitty poems and darker paints. 

Once, after imagining what they might come out with, she even laughs out loud – particularly inappropriately, given that she's sitting in a corner in the Legion at Ren's fucking  _wake_ at the time. 

“Get out, Jem,” Auntie Maureen hisses at her past her sherry glass. “Show some respect!”

_Oh, please_ , she thinks.  _Get me out. Get me fucking_ out  _of here._

 

*

 

She dyes her hair. Does her homework. Writes an essay on public health initiatives in the Renaissance for her GCSE history coursework. Is not, surprisingly, all that depressed.

She makes a copy of Ren's last mix-CD. Listens to it, when she feels like hurting herself, but it's pretty useless compared to Mum and Dad's crushingly bad attempts at living like the house only _ever_ had three people in it... or the moments when they _don't._

She still turns off the radio whenever the songs play there.

 

*

 

The denial doesn't last for very long. Zombie apocalypses don't leave much time for thinking, apparently, and ' _Oh god no this can't be happening no this isn't real'_ is _not_ a useful response to the dead guy who's just accosted you in the street. _“Aauuurghhh!”_ isn't a great deal of help either. Even al l those hours over at Viv's house, playing _Resident Evil,_ were less helpful than she'd have thought. Computer games don't ask you to upload the faces of your nearest and dearest before letting you play, do they?

Kieren would have cracked a joke about verisimiliwhatsits and realist movements, if he'd been there. 

If he hadn't been dead.

If he hadn't been  _undead_ .

It was days before she saw him, and when she finally did – stumbling along the gennel that ran behind the Close, blood on his face, old Mrs Dalton fending him off with her zimmer frame and the kind of old-ladyish fighting experience that comes from probably  _nine_ decades of pointy-elbowed church-fete bargain-hunting, before an equally decrepit zombie came up behind Mrs D and got the drop on the old bag....

Well, it was almost a relief, seeing him there. At least she didn't have to wonder any more.

 

*

 

_Don't let it see me don't let it see me don't let it see me._

Jem presses her back against the jars of Nescafe and Kenco, wondering if the granulated mix of glass and coffee on the floor will make a difference. She's not sure how good a sense of smell the rotters have, even now, but it probably can't hurt.

She _does_ know how to put them down. She doesn't know if it hurts _them_ , but she really, really hopes it does.

 

*

 

She's known, now. A hero. And it's terrifying and brilliant, for a while, until she starts seeing Ren in their faces, even when it isn't really him, even though  _he_ isn't really him. Then it's just squalid and terrifying. She wakes up sweating and gasping in the nights, and she tells herself,  _Today. Today I'll do it. I'll find him, and I'll do it, and he can sleep at fucking peace again._

 

_*_

 

PDS, they call it now. _Partially_ deceased, like you can be partially anything.

Not that it matters. It's not him. He can't come _back._ Not as himself, not as the Ren she loved and lost, the Ren she couldn't even put down when she had the chance. 

Jem doesn't tell herself it's just a phase, because it's not. It's fucking _not_.

She made her choices.

 

She had no choice.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very last minute treat, I'm afraid (written after the collection opened), so it's not full length and some of the details might have drifted off-canon. Hope you like it anyway!


End file.
